The history of the ethnic borderlands of Hungary and Romania in the years 1867–1944 were marked by changing national borders, ethnic conflicts and economic problems. Using a local case study of the city and county of Szatmár/Satu-Mare, this thesis investigates the practice and social mechanisms of economic nationalizing. It explores the interplay between ethno-national and economic factors, and furthermore analyses what social mechanisms lead to and explain inclusion, exclusion and annihilation. The underlying principle of economic nationalizing in both countries was the separation of citizens into ethnic categories and the establishment of a dominant core nation entitled to political and economic privileges from the state. National leaders implemented a policy of economic nationalizing that exploited and redistributed resources taken from the minorities. To pursue this end, leaders instrumentalized ethnicity, which institutionalized inequality and ethnic exclusion. This process of ethnic, and finally racial, exclusion marked the whole period and reached its culmination in the annihilation of the Jews throughout most of Hungary in 1944. For nearly a century, ethnic exclusion undermined the various nationalizing projects in the two countries: the Magyarization of the minorities in dualist Hungary (1867–1918); the Romanianization of the economy of the ethnic borderland in interwar Romania (1918–1940); and finally the re-Hungarianization of the economy in Second World War Hungary (1940–1944). The extreme case of exclusion, namely the Holocaust, revealed that the path of exclusion brought nothing but destruction for everyone. This reinforces the thesis that economic nationalizing through the exclusion of minorities induces a vicious circle of ethnic bifurcation, political instability and unfavorable conditions for achieving economic prosperity. Exclusion served the short-term elite’s interest but undermined the long-term nation’s ability to prosper.

La décennie 1990 constitue pour bon nombre de pays d’Afrique subsaharienne – francophones notamment – une transition de régimes autoritaires vers des régimes démocratiques. C’est le cas de la Guinée où un processus démocratique s’est ouvert dès la moitié des années 1980, avec la chute du régime dirigiste d’Ahmed Sékou Touré. A l’inverse des démocraties libérales occidentales dont elle s’inspire, la démocratie conventionnelle adoptée en Guinée existe dans l’architecture juridico-institutionnelle mais ne fonctionne pas, dans les faits, sur la base d’institutions politiques et sociales qui transcendent les clivages ethniques et communautaires. L’ethnicité en est la matrice fondamentale. Elle se manifeste par l’hybridation de produits institutionnels d’import-export à des réalités locales spécifiques. L’Administration publique, les partis politiques, les organisations socio-culturelles s’appuient explicitement ou implicitement sur l’ethnicité dans leur rapport au politique. Plusieurs facteurs sont à la base de ce double phénomène d’ethnicisation du fait politique et de politisation du fait ethnique en Guinée. On peut l’attribuer aussi bien à la fragilité de l’Etat qui peine à assurer ses missions régaliennes – sécurité, justice, bien-être, etc. – qu’à l’insuffisance de l’ancrage des valeurs, normes et principes de la démocratie libérale dans la société guinéenne. A cela, il faut ajouter le rôle structurant de l’ethnie comme groupe social de mobilisation politique dans les représentations collectives. / For a good number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa – the French-speaking ones especially – the 1990s represented a transition from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones. This is the case in Guinea where a democratic process began in the mid-1980s, with the fall of the very strict regime of Ahmed Sékou Touré. In contrast to the Western liberal democracies on which it is based, the conventional democracy adopted in Guinea exists in the juridico-institutional layout but does not, in reality, function on the basis of political and social institutions that transcend the ethnic and community groups tensions. Ethnicity is the fundamental matrix. It is manifested by the hybridization of import-export institutional products with specific local realities. Public administration, political parties, socio-cultural organizations rely explicitly or implicitly on ethnicity in their relationship to politics. Several factors are at the root of this double phenomenon of ethnicization of the political fact and politicization of the ethnic fact in Guinea. One may attribute both to the fragility of the State which is struggling to ensure its sovereign missions - security, justice, well-being, etc. - and to the inadequacy of the anchoring of the values, norms and principles of liberal democracy in Guinean society. To this must be added the structuring role of ethnicity as a social group of political mobilization in collective representations.